Wieland on Ammo

It is now more than 25 years since Lee Reed began experimenting with bonded-core bullets in the small town of Quinter, Kansas – experiments that resulted in the famous Swift A-Frame hunting bullet.

The A-Frame is, today, one of the very finest hunting bullets available. Its design may not be revolutionary, combining as it does two well-known principles in its central partition and bonded core. But Reed was the first to put the two together.

Unbelievable as it may seem, the Weatherby line of cartridges is now 70 years old. This is even more wondrous when you consider that the .375 H&H celebrates its centennial this year. We – or at least I – think of the .375 as old and the Weatherby cartridges as new. But in reality, historically, they’re both venerable.

The first two Weatherby cartridges, the .257 and .270, both date to around 1942, when Roy Weatherby was a wildcatter and amateur ballistician living in Kansas. They were followed fairly quickly by the 7mm, .300, and .375, then later by the .378, .460, and .340.

Now that it’s possible to buy a half-dozen different varieties of cartridges like the .470 and .500 Nitro Express, the ammunition has become a commodity and the shooting of such rifles routine.

This is all well and good, except for those who revel in hunting with oddballs, and seek out rare or unusual rifles, in unfamiliar chamberings that demand hand-made ammunition. Hunting with such guns is often done more as a stunt than anything else; more than one article has appeared in hunting magazines, conveying immortality on the writer, purely because he shot some animals with a gun that had not been used since Victoria reigned. For those of us who like the weird, wacky, and wonderful in cartridges, the many editions (13 and counting) of Cartridges of the World have been the bible since the very first one appeared, compiled by Frank C. Barnes and edited by John T. Amber, in 1965. Admirable as it is in many ways, when it comes to British cartridges especially, there are some notable gaps.

The trickle of hunters going to Africa to hunt with black-powder hammer rifles has not become a flood, but judging from the letters, enough are doing it that it’s worth looking at which bullets work in such rifles, and which ones don’t.

Compared to the dark days of the 1980s, owners of old rifles in obscure calibers are a lot better off today.

Back then, if you owned a .475 No. 2 or a .350 Rigby, chances were you needed to get it rechambered, rebored, or rebarreled to something like .470 NE or .375 H&H if you wanted to shoot it.